In the week of the launch of Casino Royale redux, the dramas surrounding the unfortunate poisoned former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko have inevitably recalled some of Ian Fleming's plot twists. But after that, interestingly, the trail goes cold.

English literature (even English crime, with the exception of Sayers and Christie) is emphatically not full of poison dramas (apart from Webster's Duchess of Malfi). This is all the more remarkable because, in Victorian times, when divorce was not only unthinkable, but beyond the reach of ordinary people, poison was the nation's favourite way to get rid of unwanted spouses.

In our own time, the only considerable novel (involving thalium) is Nigel Williams' The Wimbledon Poisoner. But that was a black farce. The Litvinenko case looks much more like a squalid Russian tragedy.